The French legislation is very strict about politic:
-Any news-man linked with a political party has to make a break during the campaign.
-The time of speaking of each candidate (or supportive people) in the medias is count and they have to be equal at the end.
-TV adds are forbidden
-Public notices are limited to specific areas, with the same space for each candidate.
-Companies support is forbiden (they can't provide funds to political partys).
-etc ....
But this time, the politics use a "new" media out of control.
For 2 years now, internet has fully entered in the communication plan of politicians.
The right party (UMP) started the "war" with:
- -adds on google
- -spams
- -podcasts on blogs
Some new tools measure the noise made by the political use of internet (Tendançologue for the RSS Flux, Politibuzz for the blogs and the Présidographe for the search engines).
The principal limits of the "e-campaign" is the emergence of videos published without approval and control on Youtube or Dailymotion detracting some candidate.
Even if nobody knows the exact list of the candidates, the campaign is already virulent on internet and would become more and more important in the next months. It is impossible to assure this media will have an important role in the choice of the internet users, we will have the answer on May 6th.
